our home and cherished land

~ Brin ~ Leave a comment

thehausghosts:

Today I talked to a girl, a teenage girl old enough to drive and contribute to society with a job, who did not know what a house hippo is. She had no fucking clue. I tried to tell her how much they like the crumbs of peanut butter on toast but she didn’t understand. And in that moment I realized I was fucking old.

 

thehausghosts:

I realized this is such a Canada specific post omg. If you don’t know about the house hippo, please enjoy this one minute video that almost every Canadian alive in the 90s can recite verbatim.

 

etriva:

 

thewinterotter:

Okay I thought this was adorable and then I got to the end and it’s a commercial about… teaching people critical thinking skills and healthy skepticism and like… fact-checking? This is amazing. The House Hippo needs to come to America.

 

tzikeh:

Tumblr needs to adopt The House Hippo as its mascot. Instead of Snopes, we should just respond to bullshit posts with “PLEASE FEED YOUR HOUSE HIPPO. HOUSE HIPPO NEEDS FOOD BADLY!”

 

perfmisha:

I just want to say, as a kid I always saw this commercial and I was too busy flipping shit about a house hippo that I never payed attention to the last bit and I thought house hippos were real until I was like 8.

 

justice-turtle:

frankly until I scrolled down I thought house hippo was gonna be some Canadian term for a roomba

…90′s? I didn’t move to Canada until 2007 and I saw the house hippo commercial.

(Although I suppose the math still checks out, since if you haven’t seen the commercial since you were, like, eight, you might not remember it. Much like how the parents of a given generation are much better at making references to that generation’s children’s media than the kids are.)

Tags:

#our home and cherished land #house hippo #amnesia cw #(I know it bothers *me* when people wax nostalgic about things I technically experienced but no longer recall) #(there’s some shows and movies I can’t watch because it’s too painful to watch something #–as the Men in Black commercial I mentioned recently put it– #”again for the first time”) #(so you know) #(if you’re a young Canadian who can’t bear to watch this again for the first time) #(I understand) #(but if not I recommend it)

Image ~ ~ Brin ~ Leave a comment

Holy shit, why did I not buy No Name knockoff Thin Mints sooner?

They’re better than Girl Guide cookies (none of that Oreo-like cream bullshit), and very nearly as good as Girl *Scout* cookies.

(Not sure why they’re square, but hey.)

Tags:

#oh look an original post #I’m saving most of them for use in my birthday pseudo-cake #but I tried one first to check if they were good enough #yes. yes they are. #(I didn’t intend for this to be part of the post-election emigration discourse) #(but it occurs to me one could interpret it that way) #(come to the Canadian side we have cookies) #bluespace #maybe? I never thought of my counter as Tumblr-coloured before but it’s kind of similar when seen side-by-side #food #our home and cherished land

~ Brin ~ Leave a comment

redbeardace:

Remember:  Do not move to Canada in response to this election.

Move to Florida.  To Ohio.  To Pennsylvania.  We need you there for Warren/Booker 2020.

Here is a fact that it seems like a lot of people don’t know, and which is relevant to the decision: in America, you do not lose your vote if you move out of the country. Even if your move is permanent. Even if you were a minor when you moved away. Unless you renounce your citizenship–note that most countries will let you hold up to three citizenships simultaneously, and Canada in particular is perfectly happy to let you keep your American citizenship while becoming a Canadian citizen (if you don’t already have three, and if you do it presumably doesn’t have to be the American one you give up in exchange)–you retain voting rights indefinitely. Jurisdiction-wise, you vote as if you still lived in your most recent American residence.

(People who are American citizens only through their parents and have never actually lived in the country may be able to vote depending on where their parents lived: states vary. Check out the website linked above for details.)

I don’t know what happens if you move to a swing state just to establish it as your voting jurisdiction, then move to Canada. I don’t know if there are any consequences if the government catches you at it, and I don’t know how likely they are to catch you. Anyone interested in doing that should look into it further. But at the very least, if you already live in a swing state, you don’t have to choose between voting there and leaving the country. You can do both.

I mean, you do lose going door-to-door canvassing and whatnot, I suppose. But people planning on moving to Canada because of Trump who wouldn’t have done it anyway are probably doing it because they expect to be in danger if they stay. Staying in a dangerous situation in order to go canvassing is…well, if you want to do that, you do you, but it seems above and beyond the call of duty to me.

Tags:

#home of the brave #election 2016 #our home and cherished land #reply via reblog #this is the third post I saw on Tuesday which #appeared to be written under the assumption that People Like Me do not exist #I’m responding directly to this one because its People Like Me #is ”people whose relationship with the American government is like mine” #and our existence is an external fact that I can point to #the others were ”people whose minds work like mine” #which is much harder to prove and much likelier to lead to goalpost-moving #”we totally believe you exist! we were just using universal language for rhetorical effect! stop derailing!” #and for all I know maybe they’d mean it when they’d claim they were being rhetorical by pretending I don’t exist #let’s just say I’ve been feeling that authoritarianism post again lately

~ Brin ~ Leave a comment

justice-turtle:

is anybody still awake out there

is anybody still alive

it’s like a horrible reverse rapture and I know if I eat all the ice cream I’ll have a sugar crash and my teeth will hurt and I won’t be able to sleep but I want to eat all the ice cream :-(

*hides*

To be perfectly honest, my first thought when Mom knocked on my bedroom door this morning to tell me Trump had won was “goddammit, JT is going to lose their mind”. (In part because of trying to help you keep your mind last night, but still.)

*hugs* I love you, please stay safe, and if ever you flee to Canada, I will be the first to welcome you home.

Tags:

#home of the brave #election 2016 #our home and cherished land #reply via reblog

~ Brin ~ Leave a comment

somnilogical:

I would suggest that there is no harm in knowing exactly what you have to do if you had to move to Canada, Australia, Japan, Israel, England etc. on short notice, if you are worried about this.

It is useful to have these things computed ahead of time in emergency situations.

A lot of people actually have procrastinated on leaving real dystopias because figuring out how to move and then moving is an effort-intensive process.

If you’re concerned that you might be forced to move, setting aside a day to work out the details of how you would do this and writing it down would

(1) likely relieve some vague feelings of unease attatched to thoughts like “I might have to leave if things start to get really bad.”

(2) make “I can just leave, I know how to do this” a more available response to the thought “things look like they are getting kind of bad”

#advice to myself  #mostly  #it is easier to phrase it as advice to others though  #advice to all those who share these thought patterns  #is more exact

Tags:

#home of the brave #election 2016 #our home and cherished land #good advice

~ Brin ~ 1 Comment

I can’t remember now who it was (I know @sinesalvatorem has been talking about school lately, but I think it was before that) who was talking about the overly large grip the school system has on society, and gave the example of how “what grade are you in?” is often used instead of “how old are you?”. I was thinking this morning* about that, about my own attempts to navigate the dreaded “what grade are you in” question as a homeschooled child.

At first, when I was very young, I would just freeze in confusion. I had no idea what they wanted from me.

Eventually I learned it was a weirdly convoluted way of asking for my age. I didn’t think in grades, I thought in years. Sometimes, if I could remember the age–>grade translation algorithm well enough (it was hard to keep straight even at the best of times), I would translate for them. Other times I would try to cut to the point and give them my age in years. (Occasionally I’d get persistent people who would keep asking for a grade after being told an age. Usually I tried to explain that that’s not generally a meaningful question when you’re homeschooled**, either in that abstract way or–if I could remember the grade levels involved–saying things like “well, my math and history textbooks are designed for Xth grade, my spelling workbook for Zth grade, my writing textbook for Wth grade…”)

This all got worse after I moved to Canada, because it turns out that by Canadian standards I was born on a different side of the school birthday cutoff. While homeschooled grade levels are, as I said earlier, generally flexible, my parents had taken the lead of the American school system and started me on a kindergarten program at the same time I would have started public kindergarten, shortly before I turned six. While the grade levels of my textbooks soon diversified according to my abilities, there was a rough trajectory based on this starting point. In Canada, the birthday cutoff is in December instead of September, and a Canadian kindergarten would have wanted me shortly before I turned five.

There was no simple translation anymore, not even at the best of times. If I told them my grade, they would think of me as younger than I was. If I told them my age, they would think of me as older than I was. If I told them both, they would think to themselves “ah, she was held back a grade”, lower their estimation of my intelligence, and view me through that lens.

In an attempt to avoid all of these outcomes, I started to use longer explanations more often. For a couple of years in my mid-teens, the explanations began with “I lost count at 9th grade”, because frankly I had. I didn’t bother trying to get a grip on it again; what would it help if I were going to have to do the whole explanation anyway?

When I joined Girl Guides, soon after moving, I was placed by grade. I was placed according to the grade I was “actually in”, not the grade I “would have been in” if I’d been raised in Canada. I was a year older than people expected of me, and it tripped them up, especially in my last year after I reached age of majority.

(”You forgot the ‘parent or guardian signature’ bit on this form.”

“I’m eighteen. I am my guardian.”

“Oh, right.”)

—

This sort of thing seems to be a common problem across a lot of people whose lives are weird in some way. Somebody asks you what they think is a simple question, expecting a simple answer, and you’re like “oh god, do I lie? do I say something technically true but highly misleading? do I dodge the question? do I give a short answer with lots of implied weirdness*** that raises more questions than it solves? do I launch into an explanation of why [it’s not a meaningful question]/[it’s more complicated than that]?”

—

*An hour before waking-up time, goddammit brain.

**Sometimes you get homeschoolers who try to be very rigid and follow a strict grade system, but most of them loosen up before long and the ones who don’t are considered kind of weird.

***Example: “I’m on vacation between Xth and Yth grades,” says a child in October.

Tags:

#oh look an original post #our home and cherished land #I should probably get a homeschooling tag #I’ll go for something obvious #homeschool

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~ Brin ~ 1 Comment

sinesalvatorem:

ilzolende:

funereal-disease:

lenyberry:

funereal-disease:

Is “identifying foreign words by phoneme cluster” a thing that many/most people have trouble with? It’s something I’ve been instinctively able to do for as long as I can remember, but quite a few people have told me lately what an uncanny ability it is.

I’ve studied only a couple of foreign languages, and both of them were Romance-based. I pick up languages and grammatical rules very quickly, though. Even when I don’t understand the language being used, I can almost always pick out which language it is, or at least which language family.

This comes so naturally to me that I’ve never thought of it as weird, but recently people have been downright awed that I can, say, pick out the Thai dishes from the Vietnamese ones on a pan-Asian menu. Even though Thai and Vietnamese have totally different phonemic structures! It’s not that hard! People are often frequently baffled when I identify someone’s ethnic extraction by their surname, which, like – I dunno, all I can say is it’s not that hard!

I swear this isn’t me humblebragging – I am legitimately confused that this does not seem to be a common thing.

I too do the thing. I always figured most people’s lack of ability to do the thing was primarily related to most people’s disinterest in learning even the tiniest bit of foreign languages unless the language in question is going to be directly useful to them in a way they can quantify. But also I’m hyperlexic so, maybe that’s a factor too.

In my case people have more frequently expressed surprise at my ability to pronounce surnames, but that’s directly tied to recognizing their derivation – when you know what language a name derives from, and have a vague idea of the pronunciation rules of that language, it’s generally not too hard to at least come really close to correct pronunciation of the name.

Hyperlexia nation checking in! @ozymandias271 is the only other hyperlexic I know off the top of my head; do they also do the thing?

Same re: pronunciation. Weirdly enough, though, that often leads to me pronouncing it incorrectly, or at least what the person in question considers incorrectly. French names are very common where I live, but most of them have been Anglicized to the point where the original pronunciation becomes wrong.

I’m hyperlexic and okay but not great at this? (I can’t distinguish Swedish and Norwegian, and I can tell the difference between Korean and {Chinese, Japanese} but I can’t tell Chinese and Japanese apart, etc.)

I am pretty good at doing the thing, because I pick up linguistics rules really easily. (My project for the past two days has been teaching myself the grammar of Classical Sanskrit (hence the Bhagavad-Gita blogging), which I expect to take about a week to get mostly-down. I’m not planning to memorise Panini’s entire generative grammar, though.)

However, I am really awful at remembering vocabulary, which is why I’m monolingual. Give me the words, and I’ll successfully make sentences in half a dozen languages. If I’m allowed to make the sentences really simple, I could probably do two dozen languages. However, expecting me to remember any of those words the next day is a lost cause.

Despite hyperlexia, I’m not all that good at distinguishing languages by phoneme usage.

I’m a lot better at picking up vocabulary than grammar. I mentioned “read[ing] okay Packaging French, but don’t expect me to write it” recently: when presented with an everyday French sentence of the sort one might see on a sign or a bag of food, there’s a fair chance I’ll be able to work out the gist of it. If you ask me what the French word for [insert thing here] is, a significant-though-still-fairly-small amount of the time I will be able to answer. (As long as I am allowed to submit my answer in writing.) I cannot predict the grammatical structure of a sentence that isn’t currently staring me in the face, and I might not recognise it in a sentence that is currently staring me in the face.

Ingredient lists, which have almost no grammar and consist mostly or entirely of terms that any Canadian who doesn’t grow all their own food would be naturally exposed to†, are easiest. I am frequently able to read entire French ingredient lists without any guessing at all.

(One time, I actually understood the French side of the package better than the English.

Me, in grocery store: *looks at chocolate bar*

Me: “Chocolate with marzipan”. What is marzipan, anyway?

Me: *reads French side* “Chocolate with almond paste”. Oh.)

†Though I can’t promise how much attention other people pay.

Tags:

#combine me and Alison and you get someone who almost knows what they’re doing #language #reply via reblog #food mention #our home and cherished land

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~ Brin ~ Leave a comment

lizawithazed:

elpatrixf:

elpatrixf:

You know how there’s team instinct, mystic and valor right?

We should make a team for us people who can’t play pokemon go because our phones don’t support it

I present you team can’t play Pokemon GO because my phone or tablet does not support it and this is the official team logo

Team Shitty Phones

there, now we can all feel like we belong somewhere

How about team “doesn’t live in a country where it’s out yet”

Team logo is a maple leaf surrounded by EU stars

Tags:

#Pokemon Go #I’m both

Image ~ ~ Brin ~ 1 Comment

Happy Canada Day!

This maple leaf pin (picture of moose quarter for scale) was given to me by the Canadian government as a citizenship gift.

This was my third Canada Day as a citizen, and my ninth as a resident. I had a pretty quiet day today: I didn’t go to any parties, I didn’t watch the fireworks (they’re too loud, and I’m not much into pretty things). But I ate strawberry shortcake for dessert (family tradition; it’s red and white, you see), and I wore my pin, and I remembered my oath.

I swear

That I will be faithful

And bear true allegiance

To Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth the Second

Queen of Canada

Her heirs and successors

And that I will faithfully observe

The laws of Canada

And fulfil my duties

As a Canadian citizen.

Tags:

#our home and cherished land #oh look an original post #food mention